Preliminary Scans of Interstellar Asteroid Show It’s Not Aliens

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Credit: ESO/NASA

Just a bit ago, we wrote about the bizarre interstellar visitor, ‘Oumuamua — an apparently cigar-shaped rock that’s tumbling through the solar system at ludicrous speeds. As always happens when these discoveries get any substantive amount of press attention, some suggested that the visitor could well be an alien ship. After all, we can easily tell that it’s trajectory and speed mean that it cannot possibly be from our nearby, and it’s about to zoom away just as quick towards the Pegasus constellation.

With the whole world’s astronomy community eagerly following ‘Oumuamua, we’ve been able to collect plenty of data on the object, and scientists are now ready to make the bold claim that it’s probably not aliens.

Breakthrough Listen, a project meant to search for signs of extraterrestrial life, focused on the object with their Green Bank telescope — scanning the rock for any signs that it could be a probe or a ship in disguise. But, of course, they found that it’s still likely just a tumbling, oddly-shaped rock moving way faster than just about anything else we’ve seen through space.

Notably, this wasn’t just a quick check. Taking advantage of the fact that we’d only be able to study ‘Oumuamua for a short time, the researchers went through billions of channels searching for any sign of transmission using multiple different receivers and antennae. The scan went for several hours in bursts during the afternoon and evening of December 13. The group collected dozens of terabytes of data that will take quite some time to totally sort through. Even so, initial results show no signals or anything else that would suggest that the rock was made and sent by some advanced civilization.

“The team has just met and reviewed our results from all four bands observed last night and we don’t see anything continuously emitting from ‘Oumuamua,” Andrew Siemion, the director of Berkeley’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) told Gizmodo. “We’re now digging in to some of the intermittent candidates, and trying some new machine learning-based techniques we have been working on.”

To help with that, the team also targeted the object over the weekend to get a slightly different view of it as it rotates — y’know, just to be sure. Being fair, it’s also completely new to just about everyone. So far as anyone can tell, this is the first interstellar object that’s passed through the solar system in such a way that humans have been able to observe and study it. And, much as people might like to think so, scanning objects doesn’t work like it does in the movies. Much of it involves filtering out background noise and interference using complex and powerful computers.

It may be that we could have used some better methods to study the object, and, in time, this encounter may lead to procedures for scanning possible probes, but as of yet it’s just too new. Still, we’re fairly certain that it’s not aliens, because the rock doesn’t give off any radiation that would indicate it being capable of communication or transmission of any kind. Then again… perhaps we just can’t see in the right bands? Yeah?

“Maybe it’s using some subspace transponder type thing, right?” I can hear you say.

But no. It’s not aliens. It’s not a probe. Because it never is. Until, of course, it is.